Manderlay (no 76)

by Allan Fish

(Denmark 2005 139m) DVD1/2

Man’s law, a book and movie in eight chapters

p  Vibeke Windelov  d/w  Lars Von Trier  ph  Anthony Dod Mantle  ed  Bodil Kjærhauge, Molly Marlene Stensgard  art  Peter Grant  cos  Manon Rasmussen

Bryce Dallas Howard (Grace), Willem Dafoe (Father), Danny Glover (Wilhelm), Isaach de Bankolé (Timothy), Lauren Bacall (Mam), Jeremy Davies (Niels), Udo Kier (Mr Kirspe), Jean-Marc Barr (Mr Robinsson), Mona Hammond (Wilma), Chloë Sevigny (Philomena), Nina Sosonya (Rose), Suzette Llewellyn (Flora), John Hurt (narrator),

Manderlay is a film that was eagerly awaited ever since its predecessor Dogville premiered at Cannes in 2003 to the usual Von Trier reception, equal parts vitriol and garlands.  He intended it to be the first part in a proposed trilogy on America, in which Manderlay is the second instalment.  That it is very nearly the equal of the original speaks volumes not just of Von Trier himself, but in his ability to succeed even when the novelty if its uniquely simplistic style of shooting was no longer fresh.  It’s a film that demands several viewings to take in its intricacies.

            Upon their departure from the destroyed mountain community of Dogville, Grace and her gangster father return to Colorado to find that his territory has been taken over and, rather than fight it out, they take the diplomatic route of going somewhere else.  On their way, they stop by an old southern plantation, where they are amazed when a black woman comes over to their parked car to get help for their master.  Grace is then told how the community of Manderlay still lives by the rules of slavery, with an old white mistress known only as Mam, and her more youthful members of the family.  Grace is appalled and uses her father’s men to help her teach the slaves about freedom denied to them for the last 68 years.

            It would be easy to dismiss Manderlay as merely a lesser companion piece to Dogville, while many have complained, and not without reason, that the calibre of cast is not as high.  Sure Sevigny, Bacall, Barr, Kier and Davies are there from the original, but they are given little to do, while Dafoe lacks Caan’s iconic presence as the gangster father.  Character motivation is undoubtedly often hard to grasp, but not half so much as in the first film.  It must also be said that Howard lacks the acting range of Kidman, but so do most actresses, and she is as good as could be expected and then some, her smile often illuminating the most doleful of sequences.  Glover, meanwhile, comes across almost like Bela Lugosi in Island of Lost Souls, a Sayer of the Law who, in this case, is complicit in the travesty of humanity that is ‘man’s law’ to the extremity that he wrote it. 

            What must be said is that Manderlay is a truly political film, a very thinly veiled allegory and condemnation of the Bush administration and self-righteous invasion of Iraq.  His protagonist sticking her nose into matters that doesn’t concern her, forcing them to like a freedom that is alien to them, using violence, or the threat of violence, wherever necessary, and all the time having Daddy’s approval, or otherwise, at the back of her mind.  That’s not to say that Von Trier doesn’t sympathise with his heroine, as he undoubtedly does.  Yet he obviously sees her and her father, the cure from the first film, as very much part of the disease in the second.  Certainly his sexual treatment of Grace is perverse, and it must be said she is equally as much the submissive as she was in Dogville, a strong woman in a man’s world, but one who also seemingly likes being sexually mastered, emphasised in a brutally cold sex scene with a courageously naked Howard where Timothy literally seems to try to break her insides in two rather than soothe, to quote Hurt, “the pulsating explosions in her nether regions.”  Her lusts both carnal and violent, as personified in her execution of Wilma and vigorous whipping of Timothy.  Daddy’s final approval, and the irony of a case of bad timing, are the final broadsides aimed at a country that both fascinates and repulses Von Trier in equal measure.  Certainly Hurt’s final words ring true a long time after the final fadeout, “if anyone refused to see a helping hand, he really only had himself to blame.”  Now there’s ambiguity for you.